The remote server presented a valid certificate , but your system lacks root certificates (“CA certs”) without which you can’t even verify whether you’ve put on shoes this morning. The remote server presented a certificate that is distributed within your company/organization and which...

Using many control keys during the day, such as Ctrl-f to page down in Vim and Ctrl-c to kill a process in terminal, and assigning some of my own to tmux, I’ve began wondering whether all the letters of the alphabet were accounted for. The answer is: yes, they are; plus even some extr...

Mark Pilgrim is gone and with him all of his sites and work. I more than enjoyed his book “Dive into HTML5”. It was a bible of transitioning and progressive enhancement back when nobody was certain about the direction of HTML working groups and browser support. It helped me learn abou...

Caring For You. And Your Wellness. I need you to be in a good mental state for the latter half of this book. Now is the time to begin conditioning you. Let’s start with some deep breathing. Give me a good deep breath and count to four with me. Here we go. 1. 2. 3. 4. Now exhale. You c...

“Combining characters” in Unicode are marks that modify other characters. For example, to add an acute to the e’s in “resume”, you could position the cursor after the “e” and type ⌥⇧ +e . For diacritics, you can get combining characters on the Mac keyboard by combining Shift with one ...

One thing about verbose mode that most of you might already be familiar with isn’t at all documented. I’m talking about the fact that verbose mode also turns on ruby interpreter warnings, both syntax ones and those that happen at runtime (e.g. method redefined).

A scalding SEETHING LAVA infiltrates the cacauphonous ENGORGED MINESHAFTS deep within the ageless canopy of the DWEMTHY FOREST... chalky and nocturnal screams from the belly of the RAVENOUS WILD STORKUPINE... who eats wet goslings RIGHT AFTER they've had a few graham crackers and a mi...

Ruby developers are very sensitive to naming things. There are strong conventions regarding class, variable, method and file names, and these are not just organizational or cosmetic – some have their semantics even during code execution. For instance: in Rails a model named “Person” i...

This is an excerpt from the Understanding binstubs guide I wrote on the rbenv wiki . Project-specific binstubs When you run rspec within your project’s directory, rbenv can ensure that it will get executed with the Ruby version configured for that project. However, nothing will ensure...

What I’m Going to Do With the Massive Proceeds from this Book Anyone who’s written a book can tell you how easily an author is distracted by visions of grandeur. In my experience, I stop twice for each paragraph, and four times for each panel of a comic, just to envision the wealth an...

Note: this article and supporting code have been heavily simplified since their initial publication. If you’re doing all your development on the “master” branch, you’re not using git. It’s fine to stick to master if you’re only learning git, but soon you’ll have to dive into non-linea...

Gist as a platform By Mislav Marohnić on 04 Sep 2012 Did you know you can use Gists for: Publishing your Markdown-based writing with gist.io ? Sure, gists already display rendered Markdown, but it’s got all that noisy UI around it that drowns the content. Gist.io renders your gists be...

Managing email realistically → on 08 Aug 2012 Matt Gemmell: To effectively manage our email, we have to accept a few basic truths. They’re hard truths, but that only makes them even more valuable. Here they are: What’s important to other people is not (as) important to you. You are in...

Now that I’ve fed authorship and published date information to Instapaper and Readability text parsers, I don’t want them to show this byline twice (once in their own UI, and once in my content). Fortunately, they both allow means to mark certain elements to be ignored by their text p...

seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards. The final manuscript has been published on paper by O’Reilly, under the Google Press imprint. Buy the printed Work — artfully titled “HTML5: Up & Running” — and be the firs...

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Here’s a few pictures I saved before sending them to my friends on Draw Something game. I love that my days often start and end with receiving a bunch of drawings from other people and then drawing back myself.

Displaying line numbers By Mislav on 21 Jun 2012 Programming blogs have code, and that’s great. But please don’t configure your blogging platform to auto-include line numbers with your code, because it looks like crap when unstyled: Instapaper Reeder for iOS Sidenote: because people w...

I make the Internet. Originally from Zagreb, Croatia , I'm lately migrating from place to place. I do open-source projects and write about Ruby on Rails , JavaScript and other things on my blog . I'm mostly writing about programming and the Web. Write to me at [email protected]..

Lost foxes in Chapter 6. Downtown. Such juicy metaprogramming and class design! T-Shirts : "Addiction is Like Pokemon..." , "Chunky. Bacon." , and others . Want updates? Join poignant-watchers for a periodic update on new chapters. Or poignant-stiffs for dicussion. Read This Paragraph...

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Tara Tiger Brown in “Dear Fake Geek Girls: Please Go Away” , currently the most popular article on Forbes (Information for the World’s Business Leaders indeed): Today the word [geek] is the exact opposite of its original meaning; a term once used to inflict social cruelty is now a ter...

Concerning Commercial Uses of the (Poignant) Guide This book is released under a Creative Commons license which allows unlimited commercial use of this text. Basically, this means you can sell all these bootleg copies of my book and keep the revenues for yourself. I trust my readers (...

Now the newbie programmer now got burned, and asks “If and and or aren’t synonyms for operators, what are they?” The professionals then, as an answer, mumble something about “precedence”, and they add “You must